What Apollo 11 Astronauts Did On The Way To The Moon

48 years ago today, astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins were on their way to the Moon to make history - but what did they do on the three-day trip?

Three hours after liftoff, Collins recalls thinking, "It's hard to believe that we are on our way to the Moon, at 1200 miles altitude now, less than three hours after liftoff, and I'll bet the launch-day crowd down at the Cape is still bumper to bumper, straggling back to the motels and bars."

This view of Earth showing clouds over water was photographed from the Apollo 11 spacecraft following translunar injection.

NASA

Hundreds of miles above the Earth's surface, it was time for the crew to ditch the third stage of the Saturn V rocket and reconfigure the command and lunar modules for the rest of the trip. Collins had to detach the Columbia Command Module, in which the astronauts made the trip, from the rocket stage. That uncovered the Eagle Lunar Model, which had ridden into space inside the Saturn V third stage. Next, Collins docked the top of Eagle to the nose of Columbia.

CSM separates from the third stage and the LM is uncovered

NASA

The CSM extracts the LM and they continue to the Moon.

NASA

"This of course was a critical maneuver in the flight plan. If the separation and docking did not work, we would return to Earth. There was also the possibility of an in-space collision and the subsequent decompression of our cabin, so we were still in our spacesuits as Mike separated us from the Saturn third stage," Aldrin recalled later.

With its purpose fulfilled, the third stage vented the last of its propellant to move away from the modules. Fourteen hours after liftoff (10:30 PM back in Houston), the three astronauts covered Columbia's windows and went to sleep.

The crew wouldn't be that busy again until it was time to land on the Moon. The middle two days of the trip were filled with the routine work of keeping a spaceship running, which was broken up only by a small velocity correction about halfway to the Moon.

Earth as seen by Apollo 11 astronauts at the beginning of the third day

NASA

On the second day of the flight, nearly 150,000 miles from Earth, the crew filmed a 36-minute TV segment (in color!) to be broadcast back home. Meanwhile, Mission Control kept the crew apprised of choice bits of Earth news, including the fact that Russian newspaper Pravda had dubbed Armstrong the "czar of the ship." Vice President Spiro Agnew, they learned, had ambitiously called for a mission to put an astronaut on Mars by the year 2000. (Perhaps because Agnew lacked Kennedy's charisma, that's not likely to happen until at least some time in the 2030s.)

On the fourth day of the mission, Apollo 11 arrived in lunar orbit. Collins recalled later, "The Moon I have known all my life, that two- dimensional small yellow disk in the sky, has gone away somewhere, to be replaced by the most awesome sphere I have ever seen. To begin with, it is huge, completely filling our window. Second, it is three-dimensional. The belly of it bulges out toward us in such a pronounced fashion that I almost feel I can reach out and touch it."

The astronauts spent the day in orbit, preparing the Eagle lunar module - and themselves - for the next day's historic landing. "Although it was not in the flight plan, before covering the windows and dousing the lights, Neil and I carefully prepared all the equipment and clothing we would need in the morning, and mentally ran through the many procedures we would follow," said Aldrin later.